The Daily Signal - Former Acting Homeland Security Chief Weighs in on Biden Border Crisis

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Personnel with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and with Customs and Border Protection are being directed by the Biden administration to stop using the terms "illegal alien” and "assimilation.” Chad Wolf, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation and former acting secretary of homeland security in President Donald Trump's administration, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss that and other aspects of the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border under President Joe Biden. We also cover these stories: The Food and Drug Administration is expected to allow 12- to 15-year-olds to get the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for the first time. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., admits Tuesday that Republican members of the House lack confidence in the House Republican Conference chairwoman, Rep. Liz Cheney, amid an ongoing rift between the Wyoming congresswoman and former President Donald Trump. House Republicans are asking their Senate Republicans colleagues to vote against confirming David Chipman,  President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, May 5th. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Chad Wolf is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former acting secretary of Homeland Security under former President Donald Trump. He joins me on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss the Biden border crisis, as well as how the Biden administration is having immigration and customs enforcement, as well as customs and border patrol, stop using the terms illegal alien and assimilation. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now, on to our top news. The Food and Drug Administration is expecting to be allowing 12 to 15-year-olds to get the Pfizer-Coronavirus vaccine for the first time.

A recent study of 2,260 teens within the age range of 12 to 15 found the vaccine was effective per USA Today. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted Tuesday that members of the House GOP lacked confidence in House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney amid an ongoing rift between Cheney and former President Trump. Here's McCarthy's comments to Fox News. I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message. We all need to be working as one if we're able to win the majority. Remember, majorities are not given they are earned. And that's about the message about going forward. Combating Joe Biden what he's done to this border by making it unsecure and what's coming across.

Just what he's doing here about small businesses, not opening schools, not getting us back to work, back to health, back to normal. That's the message we should be talking about. I haven't heard members concerned about her vote on impeachment. It's more concerned about the job ability to do and what's our best step forward, that we can all work together instead of attacking one another. Cheney voted to impeach Trump following the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Earlier this week, the two sparred. The fraudulent presidential election of 2020 will be from this day forth, known as the big lie, said Trump in a release from his Save America pack.

In response, Cheney tweeted, the 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading the big lie, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's office also stepped in to comment on the ongoing dispute. A blog post published from the office on Tuesday read, Ward is out that House GOP leaders are looking to push Representative Liz Cheney from her post as House Republican conference chair, their most senior woman in GOP leadership, for a litany of very Republican reasons.

She won't lie, she isn't humble enough, and more. In response to the comments from McCarthy, Jeremy Adler, a Cheney spokesman, told the Washington Examiner, quote, this is about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on January 6th. Liz will not do that. House Republicans are asking the Republican Senate colleagues to reject David Chipman, President Joe Biden's choice to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

The letter led by Indian Republican Jim Banks and 68 Republican colleagues reads, If confirmed, David Chitman would use every tool at his disposal to attack American gun owners and we respectfully ask you to oppose any and all action that would advance his confirmation in the Senate. The letter also called Shipman an enemy of the Second Amendment and a longtime gun control activist and lobbyist. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Chad Wolf about the crisis at the border. This is Virginia Allen, host of the Daily Signal podcast. I don't know about you, but YouTube is certainly, one of my guilty pleasures. I really enjoy watching short videos on a variety of topics, so I'm always looking for videos that are actually educational and beneficial to me in some way.

And the Daily Signal YouTube channel never disappoints. There is so much binge-worthy content from policy and news explainers to documentaries. If you're not driving, go ahead and pull out your phone and subscribe to the Daily Signal YouTube channel so you can be in the know on the issues you care about most. You can also search for the channel by going to YouTube.com slash Daily Signal. So I'm joined today on the Daily Signal by Chad Wolf. He's a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security. Chad, it's great to have you on the Daily Signal. Well, great. Thanks for having me. What is your perspective on what's happening at the border right now? We've seen a lot happen in only about four months since January

20th when President Biden was inaugurated. So what's your perspective on what we're seeing? Well, it's truly a crisis that we see on the border today, and it's disheartening for those of us that served under President Trump over the last four years, trying to get that border in order, trying to put a number of policies and procedures in place that at the end of the day enforced an immigration consequence to those who came across the border illegally. And so what you have today is back to the catch and release policy, failed catch and release policies that we've seen over the years. unfortunately that doesn't serve any anyone here in the U.S. or the communities along that border. It makes law enforcement job more difficult at the end of the day as well. So not real excited about what I see on the border and I don't see it getting better anytime soon. Well, the Biden administration has asked both ICE and CBP to stop using the term illegal alien. What's behind this and what kind of terminology in your opinion should be used?

Yeah, well, again, this is just another set of their misguided attention. and their focus should be on securing the border instead of playing, you know, wordsmithing certain phrases in terminology. When we talk about aliens or illegal aliens, those are actually terms used in federal law. So it's not a matter of, you know, anyone making up the terms or DHS or CBP making up those terms. Those are, that's actual wording in statute that Congress has passed. So it's very simple how we use it because there are various different types of folks that come into the country, illegal aliens versus aliens versus U.S. citizens, and they all have a different connotation

because they all require different rules and procedures to them. And so simply calling everyone one term is going to be not only extremely confusing, it just turns on the head of, you know, decades of immigration law. So again, the priorities should not be on how do we make people feel better by calling them a different name. Their attention should actually be focused on trying to fix the crisis that's currently on the border. I think a lot of people are asking across this country, especially when they're seeing news and everything else's. Does the Biden administration have a border policy? Do they? What is your perspective? Well, I think they do. I think it's one that's extremely ill-conceived and does nothing for the security of the homeland. I mean,

their policy at the moment is, again, reverting back to that catch-release policy that we've talked about. So the idea is to let everyone into the U.S. that is claiming asylum, give them a free ticket into the interior, hope that they show up for their immigration court proceedings, which we know they don't do based on historical data. And so that's their policy at the end of the day. They'll talk about how they're removing families and how they're doing this and that, but they're doing that in such low numbers that it's having a negligible effect. And so whether we see it from family units or minors, their policy right now is obviously the catcher at least, but it's also encouraging these folks to take a very dangerous journey from the Northern Triangle up

here to the U.S. knowing, again, that 90% of them don't qualify for asylum and therefore will have to be removed at some future point. And so what has the Biden administration done on that part? They've restricted ICE's ability to remove individuals that are here illegally as well. So it's very troubling if you're a law enforcement officer at the department these days. Your hands are tied. You can't do your job and you can't enforce immigration law at the end of the day. Well, something you commented on Twitter about was this ABC News report and it was headlines something like unbearable conditions pushed by an administration to close Houston Migrant Center. What's your perspective? What's happening here? Why did the center close? And what was your reaction?

Sure. I think it's a, it's a symptom of they have broken the system. We had a 172,000 illegal apprehensions in the month of March alone. Usually that's a four to five, maybe even a six-month period where you get that many illegal apprehensions. They had that in one month alone. And so you have this historic surge of children and families going into shelters. They've run out of shelter space capacity. So they are increasing shelters at a rapid, rapid pace. And when you do that, you have to go outside the system. So you're looking at shelters that don't have any federal oversight. That may not be the best from a condition standpoint.

So that's what occurred in this case. In the Houston case is they opened up a shelter, and then they quickly had to close it because it didn't meet standards. It was pretty bad at the end of the day. And again, when we talk about what we did under Trump administration versus this administration, I think the hypocrisy that we see in the news media, mainly in the news media and others, is if this would have occurred in the last four years, you would have seen any number of members of Congress down there. Press would have been swarming the area. Instead, it was a one-day story, and it's gone away, and it's unfortunate.

Well, Vice President Kamala Harris has been appointed as the point person for the border crisis. She hasn't yet gone to the border. What's your perspective on what she's doing? Because it doesn't, like nothing's happened yet. So it's your perspective and what should happen? It's another misopportunity from the administration to actually get serious about the crisis that's occurring on the border. So she keeps talking about how her role is more higher level, talking to the Northern Triangle countries about root causes of migration. And I think that's okay.

But that's a two, three, four year problem, maybe even longer. What she needs to do or what the president needs to do is actually go down to the border, talk to the law enforcement, the men and women that are doing that border, or the folks that are interviewing the asylum seekers, the folks that are processing the medical folks, and to understand and hear from them firsthand the difficulties and challenges that they're having on the border. It's only then do you really understand the magnitude of the situation? And then you can talk to Mexico.

You can talk to our foreign partners about how to resolve this. But if you have no context and you have none of those discussions, it's very hard to represent the U.S. in this crisis when you're talking to a foreign country. Something else that really isn't being talked about, too. what's the financial cost to the taxpayer when it comes to all of these immigrants coming in and health care and other things that are incurred? What does that cost look like for the average American? So I would bucket these into two different costs. One are the immediate costs. So

there's a tremendous amount of resources right now that are that we're throwing at the problem. And that's a capacity problem. So Biden administration, instead of enforcing the law on the border, they simply are opening up more and more centers. And as you do that, you have to pay. The federal government's paying NGOs and private contractors to continue to open up more and more facilities. They wouldn't have to do that if they would address the surge, what's causing the crisis. They don't want to do that so they're spending more and more money. And then, of course, the long-term effects is what does this do for health care and education where all of these unaccompanied alien children will go into U.S. school systems, will go health care

systems, the family units that are being released, you know, is there a welfare impact? So there's a lot of, they're short term, and then there's sort of longer society impacts as well. You mentioned when the migrants come in, a lot of them are given a court date. A lot of times they don't show up for that court date. So where are these migrants being released to, is it just in border areas or is it anywhere in the country? Yeah. So I would actually back up. You know, what we've heard from the Biden administration is they're not even issuing court dates any longer in places in Texas.

Because they're so overwhelmed, what they would normally give them as a notice to appear, what we call an NTA. which is to say, we're going to release you into the interior, but you need to show up at the specific court on this date, on this time, and then we'll start the immigration proceedings. Because they're so overwhelmed with a number of folks, they're not even issuing that. They're simply opening the door saying, please return to a court near you, wherever you go.

Well, we know they're not going to do that. They have no incentive to do that at the end of the day because no one's tracking them. No one knows where they're at. So it's very, very disconcerning. But again, what we do know is the ones that do show, show up. They may show up for their first court case, but this is usually several steps in the process. They don't show up for latter court dates, which is very problematic. And then where are they

going? You know, what we say is every community in America is a border community because the traffic or the illegal activity doesn't just stop at the border, doesn't stop in McAllen or Tucson or San Diego. It goes everywhere. So a lot of these folks that are coming in and being released are going to every major metropolitan city across the country, Detroit, Dallas, Chicago, New York, you name it, they're traveling there. Who's paying for the travel of those across the border? Is it their families? Is it the government in some cases?

How does that work out? So it's a combination of both. In what we see, again, in this administration, because they have let contracts here recently, the federal government's paying more and more of those expenses. They usually do that indirectly. So we'll give contracts out to NGOs for, quote, unquote humanitarian assistance, and that sometimes goes towards transportation costs. So at the end of the day, the federal government becomes that last link in that human smuggling

chain because they are reuniting, whether it's a child or a family, with relatives here in the country. And that's exactly what the smugglers are counting on. That's how they continue to advertise. They advertise if we get you to the U.S., the federal government will finish our process and will unite you with your parents or your relatives. So in some cases, is the government deciding where these people are sent, or is it always the families and those who are coming across the border? Yeah, it's usually, they'll come into either Border Patrol facilities or HHS facilities, but mainly Border Patrol, and then they'll be released.

They'll usually be released to an NGO sort of in El Paso or McAllen or wherever they cross the border. And then the NGO will talk to them and say, do you have family here? And almost all of them have some type of family somewhere, whether it's in Los Angeles, it's in Seattle. Again, pick your major metropolitan city. And they'll say, here's a phone number. And then the NGO calls,

and then they try to figure out how to get them to that location. When it comes to the national security impact of the situation at the border right now, how prevalent would you say are foreign nationals from other countries, despite Mexico and Central America? So other countries, are they coming in and how frequent is that? Well, absolutely. I would say every day border patrol apprehends anywhere from 25 to 35 different nationalities. Obviously, the Northern Triangle in Mexico are the largest that they see, but there's folks from Cuba, there's folks from Central Africa, and others that they pick up

and apprehend. And so when we talk about the security on the border, obviously there's a humanitarian crisis that we see today, but there's also a security aspect to that because the more and more people that get into Border Patrol stations, the more and more agents, DHS has to pull off the line and put them in those stations to care for those migrants, to feed the migrants, to do a lot of handholding that we say. And so they're not on the border actually doing their national security mission. So today you have between 5 and 6,000 illegal apprehensions a day. That's occurring on that southwest border. You probably have another 1,200, what we call gotaways. Those are folks that we don't have the personnel and we never see and they slip in, they go into the interior of the country.

The question is, we don't know who they are. So they could just be illegal migrants looking for economic opportunities or they could be more nefarious. They could be some bad actors, but we just don't know who they are. When you hear the rhetoric that walls are immoral and that, you know, having some sort of immigration system that that that's immoral, that's wrong, that's not welcoming, we've heard that in different places. What is your response to that? I think it's absurd. The whole idea of a country of a nation is to have a border.

And you have to enforce that border. Otherwise, you're letting anyone and everyone in. And then we're just not a, we're not a country of the rule of law. It's how the country was founded. It's how we should remain. And you, you disincentivize folks coming here the right way, the legal way, where they go through a process. They get vetted. They come into the U.S.

And if you don't have some integrity in that process, meaning that you keep out folks that come here illegally. And if there's no integrity there, then there's no incentive, and then the whole structure breaks down. So this idea that borders are immoral, that we should let in everyone, that's not how the country works. It's not the rule of law. And then I would say, when we talk about a border wall system, I would encourage anyone who's against it to come down here and talk to the men and women who actually have to patrol the border. And they will tell you, I've talked to thousands of them over the years. every single one, I haven't met one that doesn't want an effective border wall system. It helps them do their job better.

And so as we look at our military, you know, and we give them the best tools and equipment to fight our battles overseas, we should do the same to the Border Patrol and the men and women of DHS. We should listen to what they need and then give them what they need. And President Trump was very good at that. And what we've seen, unfortunately, the Biden administration is they're ignoring law enforcement and they're making political decisions with the security of the homeland. On a more personal note, as someone who worked in the Trump administration to develop border policy,

seeing what's happened in the course, as we said, over a couple months, is it frustrating to you? How do you, like, how do you respond when you see everything you do? Sure. It's not only frustrating. It's disheartening, and it's something that didn't have to happen. I've talked with Border Patrol officers, agents, and officials since I've left, and they are beside themselves.

They can't believe that all the work that we had accomplished over the last several years have just been undone in a matter of weeks following inauguration day here in January. And they are so frustrated with it. And they hear their leadership, whether it's coming from the leadership of the department or the White House. And I quote, says that the border is secure, the border is closed. And they know, because they work it every day, they know that's a lie. when you have 6,000 people coming across the border illegally, you have another 1,200 that they never even catch because it's overwhelming.

Of course the border's not secure. Of course it's not closed. And so when you have leadership saying that line to the American public on national television and anywhere else, you start to lose the confidence of law enforcement. And once that happens, it's very, very dangerous. What needs to be done to turn around the situation at the border? Well, there's a couple of different things. I don't think the Biden administration will do any of them, but there's a couple of things.

Obviously, you can finish construction of the border wall system. You can re-institute what we call our migrant protection protocols, which are individuals that are seeking asylum here in the U.S. They wait in Mexico into their court proceeding date is upon us. Title 42 for UACs. We can turn those individuals around as well. And again, we're not just turning them around back into the desert as President Biden. Actually, that was a quote. We've never done that.

So I'm not sure where he's getting his information. We would actually turn them around, put them on airplanes, and send them back to the Northern Triangle, reunite them with their family at the end of the day. And then our asylum cooperative agreements were actually working. So I would encourage them to reinstitute those as well. Looking at the big picture, what kind of risk does the country run in total as well as for your children, grandchildren, if this immigration situation isn't turned around? Well, I think at the end of the day, right, we continue and we've seen bills here in the House

of Representatives just recently. talking about amnesty, talking about amnesty for DACA and then a few other populations. And I don't think if we don't fix border security, we don't close some of these loopholes that we know the cartels and the smugglers and the traffickers are taking advantage of, that we'll be back here in five to six years for now, talking about amnesty for all the thousands of, and perhaps millions of folks that entered the country in 2021. Mark my word. In five years, we'll have members of Congress talking about we need to provide these folks

amnesty. And that just can't be the way that the immigration system works. You can't continue to do this year over year over year. You have to enforce your border. You have to enforce the law. And then you have to remove individuals that have no legal right to be here. And that's it at the end of the day. Former Secretary Wolf, thank you for being with us on the Daily Signal. It's great to have you. All right. Thanks again. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

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